WHERE TERROR IS A GIVEN

ASAD OF SYRIA The Struggle for the Middle East. By Patrick Seale with Maureen McConville. Illustrated. 552 pp. Berkeley: University of California Press. $25.

This book is, it must be said at the outset, a sympathetic and, indeed, rather admiring biography of Hafez al-Assad, for the past 18 years the ruthless, cunning ruler of Syria and a coup maker for a decade before. It is a prospect that many will find startling. And yet, having said this, there is much for the student of the Middle East to appreciate and digest in ''Asad,'' a study of the rise to power of the son of an impoverished, despised minority and his struggle to make Syria the indispensable Arab power.

There is rarely clear-cut right and wrong in the Middle East; the norm, rather, is wrong and wrong. As this is written, Mr. Assad's Syrian Army is pumping tens of thousands of artillery shells a day into the districts of Lebanon where the Maronite Christians live. These are the same Christians whom Syria entered Lebanon in 1976 to defend against the Palestinians, whose cause Syria was championing. And it was an incursion secretly agreed to by Syria's mortal enemy, Israel. After 500 densely footnoted pages chronicling double-crosses, betrayal, terrorism, torture, wars and all manner of mayhem and bloodshed on the part of the various tribes of the Middle East, Patrick Seale gives his subject the last word: ''Say simply that the struggle continues.'' Indeed.

Mr. Seale, a British writer whose books include ''The Struggle for Syria,'' has had access to Syrian officials and to President Assad himself that is extraordinary for a Western journalist. This is largely because the author has framed the book, written with the assistance of Maureen McConville, from Mr. Assad's point of view. And that is the strength of the book as well as its weakness. If this is a somewhat uncritical work, it also offers valuable insight into the development and thinking of this hard man, whose stubborn desire to stay at the center of events is a reality that cannot be ignored, as Secretary of State George Shultz learned to his regret from the fighting in Lebanon.

Mr. Seale says that President Assad was shaped by two factors: his Alawite background (in the Middle East, identity, even for supposed modern secularists, is fixed by religion) and the shame of the swift Arab defeat in the 1967 war.

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Numbering only about 12 percent of Syria's population but now holding an iron grip on power, the Alawites are a heterodox Islamic sect clustered in the mountains of northwestern Syria near Latakia. Their esoteric rites borrow from both Christian and pagan traditions; they believe that Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed, is divine, somewhat along the lines of Jesus in Christianity. Mainstream Sunni Muslims hold this view as heretical. The Alawites were scorned by the wealthy Sunni merchants of the city and landlords on the plains - rocks were sometimes thrown at them when they came to town. What changed things was two institutions - the Baath Party and the Syrian Army. Baathism, a radical, pan-Arab, socialist ideology, spread across the Middle East as an underground revolutionary movement in the 1940's and 50's. Its particular appeal to the Alawites was that it was a secular movement. The French, who ran Syria after World War I and were opposed by Sunni nationalists, welcomed Alawites to their forces. As the Alawites gained rank, they drew in their clansmen until they dominated the key units and strike forces.

The crushing of the Arab armies by Israel in 1967 was a similarly formative experience for Mr. Assad, who was then Syria's Defense Minister. His air force was decimated, and he retired to brood alone for three days. But as Mr. Seale amply demonstrates, Mr. Assad's desire to avenge himself on Israel has had to take second place to the machinations against his many enemies in the Arab world, particularly Iraq.

Along with the previously obscure details about Mr. Assad's early life, the most valuable parts of ''Asad'' are Mr. Seale's discussions with the veteran American diplomat Philip Habib, who has until now kept his silence about negotiations over Lebanon. Mr. Seale quotes the would-be peacemaker on his frustrations during 1981 and 1982 in dealing with the Israeli leaders Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon. Illuminating, too, are new details of the falling-out between Mr. Assad and his black-sheep brother, Rifaat, who led the elite troops that protected the Syrian Government and who, according to the author, lived high from corruption and the Lebanese hashish trade and tried to take power when he thought Mr. Assad was dying. To his credit, Mr. Seale does not shrink from describing the darker side of President Assad's rule - the corruption, the suppression of dissent by torture and killing and the use of terrorism as a tool of policy. All this is what led one American diplomat, sympathetic to the Arab position, to remark sadly that the Syrian regime was marred by ''an unfortunate tendency toward thuggery.''

John Kifner, a reporter for The New York Times, recently won a George Polk Award in Journalism for his coverage of the Palestinian uprising.

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A version of this review appears in print on April 30, 1989, on Page 7007015 of the National edition with the headline: WHERE TERROR IS A GIVEN. Today's Paper|Subscribe